The Beauty in Failure

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Sometimes when you don’t call your parents, or talk to long distances friends, it’s a good thing. It means that your life is on track – you are busy, you are fulfilled. Reaching out to others can be for comfort and support when things are not going your way. I’ve heard parents say, when your kid goes off to college and doesn’t want to call you, be happy – that means they have found their place, and don’t need you.



Others, when things get bad and stressful, wrap themselves up in a closed blanket, and only let their immediate surroundings – a pet, a lover, a best friend – in. To everyone else they disappear, only emerging when it’s sunny again.



I have done both these things: but now I am always the former, reaching out for comfort whenever possible. When in doubt, I fill my time with phone conversations and partnered activities. I don’t want to spend time alone. I am scared of being alone, maybe because I am avoiding something that comes out in the quiet, or because I have felt crippling loneliness before, and I didn’t have the skills to cope with it then, and perhaps I am still somehow traumatized. In a new place, loneliness is the biggest threat. I’ve been in overdrive to compensate for the lacking of close friends, and it is truly is exhausting, and is not quite fulfilling, either.



But the truth is, I don’t think that I really feel any more lonely here than I did in Atlanta, even though my closest friends are miles and seas away. In college I felt a different kind of loneliness – one where I was alone in my spiritual pursuits, and I could not find peers to support and guide my religious journey. But moving to Berkeley to remedy that brings another pressure – am I taking full advantage of what the city has to offer, am I diving in enough, am I seeking out the right things, am I putting my time where I want it? Things keep coming up to challenge my paths. The Emory spiritual leader becomes the East Bay baby, as I meet young spiritual musicians and Jewish teachers who are pursuing their calling in ways I dream of.



Last night, I met someone who is a sound healer, which I had never heard of before (have you?), and I felt as if I had stumbled upon a treasure. As a musician hoping to heal people through spirituality, I was drawn to, but surprisingly threatened by this work. I in a flurry of thoughts, I questioned: could this be an alternative path to becoming a rabbi? Which lead to: are the sacrifices, that of security and legitimacy (in certain circles) of being a sound healer, something I am willing to make? Which lead to: Am I stuck in a mainstream “safe” agenda for myself, or do I really want to go to rabbinical school? Which led to: what are the steps I am going to take to figure this out? You need to go identify those steps, and begin climbing.



Of course, these ARE the questions I moved here to ask, and the climbing I moved here to begin, so I am delighted they are coming forth, but I am also frightened. Because the future is too unpredictable. Because I do not <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">really know how to take care of myself. Because I see women and men around me pursuing their dreams, and I realize that I am lost, and that I know nothing at all. Sometimes I see something that strikes a memory, and I think I am abroad again, tiny in a new world; the man bicycling past me looks like the Tanzanian who would give me rides on his backseat to the shuttle, or I look outside my office window and see the shingles on the house next door, and they are broken and the red dirt color of Rajasthan. I am reminded that even though I am in America, I am in foreign country, never before having been a college graduate working to make a life for herself. But unlike Africa and India and even Israel, this is not a specified-month venture – this is the beginning of my adult life, my real world whirlwind, and I have chosen the perfect place to be. But even that crumbles, because Berkeley is not paradise, with its Oakland crime and disabled homeless and cold foggy mornings. Still, I am freer. Every day I decide in what world I want to be; the internal world, the social world, the justice world, the Jewish world, the spirit world, the money world. And the freedom is overwhelming and oh, so liberating.



I told my parents before I moved here that I wanted to fail. Because who is not afraid of failure? And for me, it is the next frontier, because I haven’t truly failed at anything big. But instead of big failing, I am little failing, but still struggling along the same way. It’s the not the epic turn around I pictured for myself. I have failed at failing. And somehow, this is harder, maybe because it is messy, and because it doesn’t feel just right.



It is messy business running your own life. High standards keep you rising, but if you aren’t careful, they can burden you with disappointment and self-disgust. So how to we balance? If we don’t remind ourselves to love ourselves, and work at it, then there is little hope that anyone else will. We will live with that little tight knot in our chests, keeping us from breathing deeply the beauty of ourselves.



It is:

The beauty in failure.

The freedom to choose.

The destiny to wander,

at least for a while.



-Ariel

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